


You Should Be

by wednesday



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: M/M, ToT: Monster Mash, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-22 14:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12483648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wednesday/pseuds/wednesday
Summary: There's a medical wipe in his hand, so they must have gone back to the car for the first aid kit at some point, too.That's about when he notices the very obvious car, door open and lights illuminating the both of them where Peter sits on a garden wall and Thomas stands in front of him. Their shadows look strange in the swirling fog, more alive than Thomas feels.





	You Should Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



His hand is on Peter's neck. It's. It's been on Peter's neck for some time now, he thinks. A minute or maybe even several. Probably several. He's snapped out of stillness by the fact he can't remember how it got there.

Thomas takes his hand away from Peter, slowly, and finds out he was apparently cleaning a set of long scratches on the side of Peter's neck and down to his collarbone. There's a medical wipe in his hand, so they must have gone back to the car for the first aid kit at some point, too.

That's about when he notices the very obvious car, door open and lights illuminating the both of them where Peter sits on a garden wall and Thomas stands in front of him. Their shadows look strange in the swirling fog, more alive than Thomas feels.

“It wasn't a vampire, sir,” Peter says, a question without making it a question. Thomas answers, because it's Peter and he can never stop indulging him. He resumes cleaning the scrapes, just in case he didn't do it well enough before.

“No, it wasn't.” It was something, but not a vampire. Thomas knows vampires, over the years has dealt with an unpleasantly high number of them, sometimes even awake ones. He has never dealt with something like the creature they found here.

“Mmhm,” Peter hums quietly, absently.

Thomas wonders if Peter can tell how out of sorts he feels, but judging by the lack of expression on his face, he's as far away as Thomas just was. He keeps working, increasingly more aware of the quiet, fog filled garden around them, the dark empty country house some fifty yards away and the smouldering pile of _something_ on the lawn between the house and them.

He smooths the wipe down to Peter's collarbone one last time; he's probably cleaned all the scratches thrice too many times just to keep his hands on Peter, who is the only thing that feels remotely real right now.

“I think it could do magic,” Peter says, eyes still distant and yet at the same time following the slow, certain movements of Thomas' hands as he searches the first aid kit for an antibacterial cream. He puts effort into keeping his hands from shaking—because Peter is watching, but for his own sake as well.

“Yes,” Thomas agrees, but he has no energy to come up with a way to elaborate. It could do magic, they both saw.

Judging by Peter's vaguely dissatisfied expression, he was expecting Thomas to deny it. Thomas _wishes_ he could deny it. The truth is, the creature stunned them both with enough magic Thomas lost time, lost most of the details of the fight, only clearly remembers Peter flying out of the through the open door, Peter being hit with suffocating strands of magic that made no sense as formae, Peter almost being decapitated by claws as long as knives. The rest of the memory dissolves in flashes of cold rage and he suspects he did something inappropriately flashy. The scorch marks on the lawn and the side of the house seem to confirm that notion.

Peter might be impressed later, if his memory of it is better than Thomas'. It's such a superfluous and vain thought, but it's not the first time he has one like it and it won't be the last; he's become inordinately fond of impressing Peter.

When his hands go back to Peter’s neck and out of the line of his sight, Peter’s eyes are drawn up to Thomas’ face. With as much calm as he’s able to dredge up, Thomas keeps steadily dressing the wounds and not showing the slightest sign of being bothered.

He is bothered, of course, but mostly by the cloying sense of wrongness that the creature’s magic has saturated everything around them with. The vestigia feels like nothing familiar, a heavy, drowning sense of sweetness and rotting flowers and death.

Compared to that, Peter’s open staring is a nice distraction, his eyes still a bit glazed over and so so dark in the pre-dawn shadows.

“I don’t think I should drive,” Thomas admits. It’s not a question, because he knows Peter is even worse off.

“We can’t leave it there, anyway. Sir.”

Thomas almost sighs, because for once he would really like to leave it to someone else.

“Of course. Not right now, though. We’ll take care of it when the sun is up.”

He’s as done with dressing Peter’s wounds as he’s ever going to be, but he’s reluctant to let go, his hands lingering on Peter’s shoulder and the undamaged side of his neck. There are white wisps of fog and smoke swirling all around them in the headlights, and he makes the mistake of looking at Peter’s face right that moment.

Peter isn’t absent at all anymore, he looks back intently and is subtly pressing back, crowding himself against Thomas’s palms.

“So we have some time to spare, sir?” he asks with audible amusement, and pulls Thomas down and closer by his tie. Thomas lets him, and the shivery rush of excitement when their lips slot together feels like finally waking up from a long nightmare.

 

 


End file.
